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A GIS-BASED MULTI-SCALE APPROACH TO HABITAT MODEL FOR THE COMMON LOON, GAVIA IMMER, IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, USA.
Citation:
KuhnHines, A, J Copeland, A. Novak, D E. Nacci, M. Brennan, AND K. Taylor. A GIS-BASED MULTI-SCALE APPROACH TO HABITAT MODEL FOR THE COMMON LOON, GAVIA IMMER, IN NEW HAMPSHIRE, USA. Presented at 19th Annual Symposium of the United States Regional Association of the International Association for Landscape Ecology, Las Vegas, NV, March 31-April 4, 2004.
Description:
The U.S. EPA National Health and Environmental Effects Research Laboratory's (NHEERL) Wildlife Research Strategy was developed to provide methods, models and data to address concerns related to toxic chemicals and habitat alteration in the context of wildlife risk assessment and criteria development. Research in this study addresses issues associated with the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of the Common Loon, Gavia immer, and multiple stressors (e.g. habitat alteration, dietary methylmercury, human disturbance, lake acidification) in real landscapes. This landscape context provides a basis for understanding and quantifying how spatio-temporally varying stressors influence the distribution of wildlife populations. Another component of this research involves assessment of scientifically credible spatial scales for wildlife risk assessments. Therefore, research issues regarding habitat alteration, including evaluating the spatial configuration of Loon habitat and methylmercury impacts in the landscape mosaic, and the issues of scaling up from local lake and watershed scale to biogeographic regional impact assessments constitute a significant component of this project. This presentation will describe the results to date on the development and evaluation of a Loon-specific habitat suitability modeling approach at multiple scales: lakeshed, watershed and biogeographical region. These Loon habitat suitability models were developed using Loon presence/absence field data collected by the New Hampshire Loon Preservation Committee from 1980-2002. Development of these habitat models includes a variety of statistical techniques to quantify relationships between local characteristics, including the spatial arrangement of the lakes as well as anthropogenic stressors such as methylmercury and land use, with the presence and fitness of Loon pairs.